Writing

The title is not quite true, but it points toward something I have found myself thinking about for years. Advertising and products usually occupy different moments in a relationship. The advertisement makes a promise and then steps aside so that the product can either fulfill or betray it. Nike campaigns encourage us to imagine a more ambitious version of ourselves, but the campaign is not the shoe. Apple's launch films and keynote presentations create anticipation, but eventually the videos are forgotten and the laptop remains on the desk. Most commercial design exists at the edge of an experience rather than within it. It persuades, introduces, and frames expectations before disappearing into the background.

Book covers occupy a much stranger position. They begin life as advertisements in the most traditional sense. They compete for attention on crowded shelves and compressed digital thumbnails. They must communicate tone, genre, authority, emotion, and aspiration in seconds. They promise transformation without explaining exactly what that transformation will be. Every decision about typography, image, composition, and color serves the same purpose that good branding always serves. It helps someone decide whether this object belongs in their life.

Yet unlike almost every other advertisement, the cover remains attached to the experience long after the purchase has been made. Packaging design rarely receives that privilege. Designers may spend months refining the geometry of a perfume box, the finish on a wine label, or the opening sequence of a new laptop, knowing full well that most of it will be discarded within hours. A cereal box survives until breakfast. Even Apple's famously meticulous packaging is ultimately temporary. It exists to stage a beautiful moment of anticipation before migrating into a closet for resale value or disappearing into the recycling bin. People who save every piece of packaging they have ever owned are usually regarded as collectors or hoarders. The package is expected to leave once it has completed its job.

I have a close friend who throws away the dust jacket from every hardcover she buys. She doesn't hate design. She just finds them annoying. They slide off when she's reading, they wrinkle in backpacks, they crease, they tear, and eventually they become one more thing to keep track of. To her, the cloth case underneath is the real book and the jacket is expendable. Every time she does it, a small part of me dies. Then I remember that she is treating the jacket exactly the way we treat almost every other piece of packaging in our lives. She is probably the rational one.

Books refuse that arrangement. The package cannot be separated from the product because it is part of the product. The same object that convinced you to buy the book remains in your hands while you read it, accompanies you on airplanes and beaches and commutes, sits on your bedside table for weeks, and eventually takes its place on a shelf where it may remain for decades. The cover is present for every emotional revelation, every difficult chapter, every underlined sentence, and every moment in which an author's ideas become intertwined with your own. It is difficult to think of another designed object that occupies such an intimate position within an experience rather than simply introducing it.

That relationship changes the meaning of the image over time. The cover you first encountered as a promise slowly becomes a container for memory. A business book that changed your career, a novel that accompanied a difficult year, a cookbook inherited from a grandparent, or a collection of poems discovered at exactly the right moment all become inseparable from the object that represented them. The design no longer describes the contents. The contents begin to describe the design. Seeing the cover years later recalls not only the text itself but where you lived, who recommended it, how old you were, and what kind of person you were becoming while you read it. The cover accumulates meaning in the same way that memory accumulates detail.

The longer I worked in publishing, the more I realized that this has very little to do with books and almost everything to do with branding. The strongest brands are not memorable because of visual cleverness. They become meaningful because experience slowly attaches itself to symbols. The Nike swoosh is simply a mark until years of running, winning, losing, advertising, aspiration, and culture gather around it. Apple's logo is not powerful because of its silhouette but because millions of interactions have invested it with ideas about craft, simplicity, creativity, and optimism. The visual system remains stable while the meaning attached to it continues to grow.

Books operate according to exactly the same principle, but on a deeply personal scale. Their covers become symbols of private experiences rather than public identities. They remind us of who we were when we encountered them. They become autobiographical objects. The books people display on their shelves are rarely there because they require immediate access to the contents. They remain because they tell a story about curiosity, ambition, taste, humor, grief, faith, politics, or aspiration. In a quiet way, they function much like the brands we choose to surround ourselves with every day. We buy the same toothpaste without thinking, wear the same shoes for decades, and quote advertising slogans that have somehow escaped their campaigns and entered ordinary conversation because those symbols have become attached to our own identities. The objects remain because the experiences remain.

Perhaps that is why I have always found book cover design to be such a demanding and rewarding discipline. A cover has to work as advertising, packaging, identity, interface, and memory all at once. It must attract attention in a few seconds while remaining interesting enough to survive years of repeated viewing. It has to represent thousands of words without illustrating them too literally and suggest an experience that neither the reader nor the designer can fully anticipate. It begins as a promise and, if everything goes well, ends as a memory.

Looking back over the work collected here, I realize I have never been especially interested in making covers that simply look attractive on a shelf. I have always been more interested in creating symbols that could survive the reading itself. The hope is that long after the marketing campaign has ended and the sales numbers have been forgotten, the image still has work to do. It sits quietly on a shelf, carrying the accumulated weight of a story, an idea, or a changed perspective, waiting for someone to remember why they picked it up in the first place.

I love amateurs.

In non-life-threatening situations, I'd go so far as to say that I prefer them. In truth, I believe amateurs are opportunities for business, for culture, for humanity. The word itself comes from Latin, by way of French, and was originally amator, simply: "lover".

I'm not alone in preferring amateurs, in some sense, most of us do, even if we might not realize it: Companies with a product to sell understand this very well, and use it against us by exploiting what is somewhat inaccurately called 'user-generated content'. (That is, short-to-long-form ads for a product or service that take the form of a person's seemingly "user-generated" review/recommendation on social media, often actually generated by a payment and/or product sponsorship to the person on the part of the company.)

The viewer responds favorably to this kind of advertising because we trust people more than ads. We prefer what we see as authenticity over the polish and, apparently, phony messaging of conventional ads, although both work quite well because we naturally prefer the known to the unknown, and are curious—we will buy the thing we've heard of, and will want to try the thing we just 'discovered' (hidden away, as it was, in a targeted ad that knows our behavior and preferences) . . .

But back to the amateurs.

We respond to UGC (user-generated content) because we see ourselves in the presenter. We identify with their experience because we share a quality in relation to the thing being sold: we are interested in that category of thing, but almost certainly do not see ourselves as experts in it.

"Western" people, particularly Americans, tend to have a higher degree of confidence in their skills/understanding of something relative to the facts than do people from elsewhere, particularly east-Asian countries, where schooling, vocational training, and regulations are all quite a bit more stringent. Taken as an average, it is an inverse relationship. Our confidence is higher and skills lower; their confidence is lower, skills higher. (reference study, and that this was a study of school subjects, maths, and the like)

But even with all of that being true, we know when we're not "experts" at something, often because we primarily spend money, rather than make it, when working on that thing. Over the last 200–300 years, "professionalism" has become tightly bound, one might say, with expertise, facility, and capacity. I choose those words carefully because many of us, individually, and certainly society at large, insist on a definitive, causation-level connection between our paychecks and our knowledge of a subject, how easily we can perform subject-related tasks, and how possible it is for us to continue developing that knowledge and skills. (Unless the person in question is a federal worker, in which case, we've been conditioned to assume the opposite is true.)

The story of tying up all of these ideas happened in direct parallel to the change in the colloquial meaning of the word amateur.

When used to describe someone's activities in a particular discipline, it initially had, at worst, a neutral value connotation, but often was positive. It describes somebody who does something for the love of it. It makes no direct claim about whether somebody is paid to do it.

("professional", of course, comes from "to profess", or to be loud about something, also not referring to whether or not you make money doing it, much less that you're actually good at it.)

In a vacuum, I'd much rather work with somebody who loves the work than somebody who's loud about it, although volume might be helpful while working inside a vacuum.

The problem with the word was in the minds of the people who were educated and highly trained in a subject 200–300 years ago (take a moment to remember who it was that could afford to and was allowed to attend an institution of higher learning back then). They wanted to ensure that nobody else could compete with them or be mistaken for one and the same, so they got loud and minimized the importance of love.

Gatekeeping and self-aggrandizing of those individuals' efforts aside, the idea stuck. And of course, we have examples to point to, such as this:

Each common use of the word cements the connection and erodes the confidence in people who might well have something great to contribute to society. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, The Wright Brothers? All amateurs. Jane Goodall. Hedy Lamarr, though famous for her acting, was an amateur inventor and co-developed the foundational technology for wifi, Bluetooth, and other communication tech. These days, despite the pejorative connotation of the word, amateurs don't just love the work; they might just have something to prove about themselves. They likely have a drive to change the status quo. So much of the history of amateurs succeeding has to do with life giving them the chance to dedicate themselves to their passion, and find the help they needed to lift off. Mark Zuckerberg had no business training; instead, seeking it on the job. Maybe it could be said that our current aversion to amateurs is actually an aversion to those lacking entrepreneurial drive or dedication to a mission, but clearly not having training does not, on its own, preclude success.

Add to this Gallup data on who actually enjoys their job (20–30% of people across sectors), and I'll tell you who would likely be more FUN to work with: an amateur.

I have occasionally hired freelancers to work for me who were not as highly trained or practiced as others. The main requirement of that arrangement was a willingness on my part to put in the time and train them. The downside was a bit more work on my end (luckily, I'm in the 20–30% who do enjoy their work), and the upside was a freelancer who was not boxed into a way of thinking that is taught en masse in schools. In each case, I can point to ways in which they approached the problem space differently and came up with solutions I was not expecting. They were enthusiastic, and they were dedicated to finding a solution, whatever it took.

With a careful investment of time, the pitfalls of an amateur can be honed into strengths. This is similar to lines of work wherein apprenticeship is still common, such as certain trades / manual labor. Not coincidentally, in my opinion, these are fields where job satisfaction is higher than the average, and on-the-job confidence is as well.

I try to keep the gate to my profession by removing the doors entirely and helping anybody with love and curiosity to get in. I believe this increases the job satisfaction average in the company, which is a proven pillar of productivity and business success. Does it make hiring riskier? I'm not sure—again, it adds onboarding time, but I see this as an investment, both in the business and in the person. Does it make work more fun? Yes.

Go ahead, call me an amateur. I've been loving my work for 22 years so far, and hope to get more lovely about it every day.